An exploration of enlightened absurdity that loses much of its appeal in the overinclusion of details.
A trio of sages explore absurdity and chase enlightenment in this Buddhist-themed picaresque from Goldstein.
Feng Kan, the first sage presented in Goldstein’s debut novel, begins his life slow-witted and without prospects for a wife or livelihood. A monk takes pity on the boy and offers to train him in the ways of monastic life. Struggling at first, Feng Kan eventually excels, performing very mundane tasks and eventually becoming the master of the monastery’s granary. After his struggles, Feng Kan finds enlightenment and goes on to train two pupils, Shih Te, the foundling of the book’s title, and Han Shan. The first half of the book concerns this trio’s mystical encounters—discoursing with demons, taming wild tigers and teaching Buddhist sutras—as well as the dialogues shared among the monks. The conversations are riddled with absurdities, the kind of intentionally illogical banter that later—in Japan—will find expression in the koans of Zen Buddhism. Unfortunately, the charm of these interactions is diminished significantly by the book’s wordy prose and the numerous digressions that explain esoteric Chinese healing practices, the structure of the human mind in Ch’an orthodoxy and the proper way to teach a wild tiger to be peaceful. All of these explanations strive for consistency with Ch’an precepts, but Goldstein misses the mark, smothering the freedom of Ch’an absurdity and apparent silliness with an overeager zeal for detail. The second half of the book contains translations of Han Shan’s poems, or those attributed to him, and these work more effectively than the earlier prose. The translator has a tin ear, but the translations are clear and sincere. More than 200 brush paintings are also included in the text, and they add vibrancy to the poems.
An exploration of enlightened absurdity that loses much of its appeal in the overinclusion of details.Pub Date: Jan. 20, 2010
ISBN: 978-1426914683
Page Count: 700
Publisher: Trafford
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2010
Review Program: Kirkus Indie
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.
A teacher and scholar of Buddhism offers a formally varied account of the available rewards of solitude.
“As Mother Ayahuasca takes me in her arms, I realize that last night I vomited up my attachment to Buddhism. In passing out, I died. In coming to, I was, so to speak, reborn. I no longer have to fight these battles, I repeat to myself. I am no longer a combatant in the dharma wars. It feels as if the course of my life has shifted onto another vector, like a train shunted off its familiar track onto a new trajectory.” Readers of Batchelor’s previous books (Secular Buddhism: Imagining the Dharma in an Uncertain World, 2017, etc.) will recognize in this passage the culmination of his decadeslong shift away from the religious commitments of Buddhism toward an ecumenical and homegrown philosophy of life. Writing in a variety of modes—memoir, history, collage, essay, biography, and meditation instruction—the author doesn’t argue for his approach to solitude as much as offer it for contemplation. Essentially, Batchelor implies that if you read what Buddha said here and what Montaigne said there, and if you consider something the author has noticed, and if you reflect on your own experience, you have the possibility to improve the quality of your life. For introspective readers, it’s easy to hear in this approach a direct response to Pascal’s claim that “all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone.” Batchelor wants to relieve us of this inability by offering his example of how to do just that. “Solitude is an art. Mental training is needed to refine and stabilize it,” he writes. “When you practice solitude, you dedicate yourself to the care of the soul.” Whatever a soul is, the author goes a long way toward soothing it.
A very welcome instance of philosophy that can help readers live a good life.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-300-25093-0
Page Count: 200
Publisher: Yale Univ.
Review Posted Online: Nov. 24, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should...
Greene (The 33 Strategies of War, 2007, etc.) believes that genius can be learned if we pay attention and reject social conformity.
The author suggests that our emergence as a species with stereoscopic, frontal vision and sophisticated hand-eye coordination gave us an advantage over earlier humans and primates because it allowed us to contemplate a situation and ponder alternatives for action. This, along with the advantages conferred by mirror neurons, which allow us to intuit what others may be thinking, contributed to our ability to learn, pass on inventions to future generations and improve our problem-solving ability. Throughout most of human history, we were hunter-gatherers, and our brains are engineered accordingly. The author has a jaundiced view of our modern technological society, which, he writes, encourages quick, rash judgments. We fail to spend the time needed to develop thorough mastery of a subject. Greene writes that every human is “born unique,” with specific potential that we can develop if we listen to our inner voice. He offers many interesting but tendentious examples to illustrate his theory, including Einstein, Darwin, Mozart and Temple Grandin. In the case of Darwin, Greene ignores the formative intellectual influences that shaped his thought, including the discovery of geological evolution with which he was familiar before his famous voyage. The author uses Grandin's struggle to overcome autistic social handicaps as a model for the necessity for everyone to create a deceptive social mask.
Readers unfamiliar with the anecdotal material Greene presents may find interesting avenues to pursue, but they should beware of the author's quirky, sometimes misleading brush-stroke characterizations.Pub Date: Nov. 13, 2012
ISBN: 978-0-670-02496-4
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: Sept. 12, 2012
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2012
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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